Monitoring Network Traffic Usage using Bandwidthd

It is important to know traffic usage of your client if you’re a Linux network administrator. You can monitor your client in text mode, graphic mode or html exported like mrtg, cacti or bandwidthd and one of my favorite bandwidth monitor is Bandwidthd.

You don’t need any database or snmp connection to monitor all of your client on bandwidthd, all you need just libcap, libpng, libgd and apache installed on your Linux system. And other good news is bandwidthd monitor all of your connected client per IP and per connection protocol.

Save your config and start bandwidthd using/usr/local/bandwidthd/bandwidthd. Put that command to your /etc/rc.localfile so bandwidthd can start on every time Linux boot.

Configuring Apache

You will can’t see your graphic report until you set/usr/local/bandwidthd/htdocs/ folder to set as apache virtual directory. Add below line to your apache config file.

Alias /bandwidthd “/usr/local/bandwidthd/htdocs”
<Directory “/usr/local/bandwidthd/htdocs”>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from All
</Directory>
Save your work and restart apache. Next open your browser and point to http://yourlinuxserver/bandwidth.